In Genna’s Recent blog post, which can be found here, she gave several good thoughts on the collaborative project. She started her article by referring to the article we looked at in the beginning of the semester, and within the article is said “all college student should have education experiences that teach them how to solve problems with people whose views are different from their own”. Going off of this quote from the article in Genna’s post, I agree with her when she said that this final collaborative project provides a great example of the quote, and I wanted to share a little bit from a Cultivating Community Event I went to a few weeks ago that relates to our project as well.
Cultivating Community is an event in which group discussion was held on “bubbles”, which essentially are known as identity markers, and how to merge those bubbles or identities to accomplish a task. In the group discussion, one thing that way brought up was that people have the language skills to communicate good and thoughtful information, but they don’t have the power to communicate what they are feeling. This relates to our collaborative final project in the aspect of giving people the power to say what they are feeling. In the first group session in this class, the discussion was solid, but they have improved greatly since then. There are many more people contributing in groups, bouncing off of each others ideas. Another reason why people are communicating more is because we all feel for the subjects and have opinions on them. In the cultivating community group discussion, we also talked about how a person has to experience or feel something to produce language. If you look at this course, we all felt something when reading the horrific encounters described in “Fourtune’s Bones” and “Medical Apartheid”, which gives us a voice to exclaim in group discussion. Lastly, we talked about how awareness of these differences in identities and beliefs leads to change. I know personally this project has shown me how to respect and value what other people have to say. I have heard insightful things in every group discussion that has helped be learn to do it. As you can see, there are several ways in which Cultivating Community can be related to both our journey in this course as well as our final collaborative project.